2020/5781
As we all know, in this week’s Parashah, Rivkah tells Ya’akov to lie to Yitzchak to get Esav’s Berachah. The question arises: why is Ya’akov allowed to do the Aveirah of lying just because his mother told him to? To answer this question, we must find other cases in Tanach in which people listened/didn’t listen to instructions that violate Halachah.
The first case we have is from Chizkiyahu: the Gemara in Pesachim (56a) talks about a time when Chizkiyahu sent people with the doors of the Beit HaMikdash to Assyria as a sign of peace to prevent war. Chazal disagreed because they were disgracing the Beit HaMikdash, but did not say that they should not have done it. On the other hand, when Sha’ul HaMelech asked his generals to destroy the city of Nov for protecting Dovid, the generals disobeyed.
From these two cases, we can derive a difference. For the case of Chizkiyahu, the people were allowed to listen to him because it wasn’t clearly wrong, and they knew Chizkiyahu had good intentions. For the case of Sha’ul and his general, they were supposed to say no to him, because what he did was completely wrong and his intentions were to punish Nov for doing a good thing.
More specifically, we’re saying that in any case of ambiguity, you should commit yourself fully to listening to your authority, because we want to be confident in what we do and not have doubts. Furthermore, the Sefer HaChinuch (71) says that we need rulers to tell us what to do so that we don’t fight over everything. In the same respect, he must also mean that you’re taking away the importance (or Kavod) of someone by doubting them when it’s not necessary.
Bringing it back to our Parashah, Ya’akov should listen to Rivkah, despite the fact that lying is Halachically wrong. This is because it was a very ambiguous case (as Ya’akov did deserve the Berachah) and Rivkah had very good and pure intentions. Furthermore, if Ya’akov disobeyed her, it would have been very disrespectful to her, and YOU DON’T DISRESPECT YOUR MOM.